


The fund, which will be managed by Sport England, will allow local authorities to apply for funding for leisure centres with pools that face immediate cost pressures including operational and maintenance costs, and energy bills. On Wednesday 15 March, the Chancellor of the Exchequer will outline that £63 million of new money will be made available in a one-year-fund. Publicly-owned leisure centres with swimming pools have been handed a financial boost following the announcement of a major new fund ahead of this week’s Spring Budget.

Internal processes such as the fast fashion model described above, are not, by themselves sufficient to remain competitive in the cutthroat world of high street retailing. In this way, the manufacturing process can be dynamically adjusted to only produce what is likely to sell, optimising revenue and minimising product waste. Machine Learning algorithms then automatically instruct systems to only order an appropriate amount of stock for each item at each individual location. Sales divs of each item are then recorded and internally processed. Upon releasing a new season of clothing, Inditex will send only a small quantity of each product to their stores and e-commerce channels in order to first gauge the customer response to each item before placing any significant order with the manufactures. Inditex, a leading Spanish multinational fashion retailer with over 7,200 stores globally, has, for many years, been leveraging AI both in store and on the e-commerce side to shape product decisions.Ī data driven supply chain management system is used across all Inditex brands to support the 'fast fashion' model which underlines their business strategy.

With this in mind, today, we bring you an insight into how technologies based in Big Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are giving many fashion retailers the edge, helping them stay afloat where others have gone under. In an ever-worsening socio-economic climate, analysts predict a grave year for fashion retailers, expecting consumer expenditure on fashion to fall by between 27% and 30% globally throughout 2021 as the world continues to battle through the COVID-19 pandemic. With an estimated current global market value surpassing 406 billion USD, the fashion industry is one of the most significant yet vulnerable industries out there.
